Roseanne Barr claims there was a divine reason she hit “post” on her 2018 tweet comparing a former Barack Obama aide to an ape. “The way I feel about it is that God told me to do what I did,” Barr told Variety on Friday about the post that ended her Hollywood career as she knew it. Replying to a screengrab of Helena Bonham in makeup for Planet of the Apes, Barr wrote then, “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” referring to former aide Valerie Jarrett, who is Black. Barr’s world came crashing down almost immediately, as then-ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey canceled Roseanne and killed the show’s awards-season campaign. “It was a nuclear bomb,” she said, recalling the fallout. Barr claimed she didn’t know Jarrett was Black at the time—but even now that she does, still insisted the post was “the perfect caption.” In fact, she said, it’s her critics who are racist: “They were so racist that they thought my tweet said Black people look like monkeys when it was about Planet of the Apes, which is a movie about fascism. Rod Serling himself said it’s about the Jews in Germany. It is not a movie about Black people,” she told Variety, directing her message to Disney CEO Bob Iger. She added, “The day of my tweet, over 2 million Americans Googled Valerie Jarrett and the Iran deal. And that was my intent. So, whatever.”
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